Last summer I wrote about Project TOOL “A cinematic role playing game in development”. The TOOL group now has a new crowd-funding campaign underway to support the making of a film based on the scenario and themes explored in the game: Project Tool by WARP — Kickstarter

A revolutionary Science Fiction film that aims to explore the meaning of life and our role in the universe.

Project Tool is a movie that aims to explore the origins of life and our attempts at understanding why it exists. At its core, it’s a film that will stay true to the foundations and principles of Science Fiction as a genre. We’re a small but very ambitious independent studio – our goal is to make a film that perfectly embodies humanity’s never ending quest to search for answers to the questions that our vast universe poses. Project Tool will be a mix of CGI and live action set pieces, and we’ve set a reasonable budget that will enable us to complete this film.

We believe that raising funds through crowd-funding is the best way to fund our endeavor, because it allows us to have full creative freedom, and allows us to deliver a movie that is true to our supporters. We need your help to make Project Tool, so please contribute to our fund raising campaign and share our project.

The goal of the project is to take advantage of the image recognition capabilities of the volunteers to classify radio and infrared images of galaxies where supermassive black holes are believed to be hiding behind clouds of gas and dust. Such images are messy and not easily defined in a way that a computer algorithm can properly characterize them.

We find that the RGZ citizen scientists are as effective as the science experts at identifying the radio sources and their host galaxies.

Ceres rotates in this sped-up movie comprised of images taken by NASA’s Dawn mission during its approach to the dwarf planet. The images were taken on Feb. 19, 2015, from a distance of nearly 29,000 miles (46,000 kilometers). Dawn observed Ceres for a full rotation of the dwarf planet, which lasts about nine hours. The images have a resolution of 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) per pixel. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has returned new images captured on approach to its historic orbit insertion at the dwarf planet Ceres. Dawn will be the first mission to successfully visit a dwarf planet when it enters orbit around Ceres on Friday, March 6.

“Dawn is about to make history,” said Robert Mase, project manager for the Dawn mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. “Our team is ready and eager to find out what Ceres has in store for us.”

[ Update: Here is a NASA JPL video about the Dawn Ceres mission:

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Recent images show numerous craters and unusual bright spots that scientists believe tell how Ceres, the first object discovered in our solar system’s asteroid belt, formed and whether its surface is changing. As the spacecraft spirals into closer and closer orbits around the dwarf planet, researchers will be looking for signs that these strange features are changing, which would suggest current geological activity.

“Studying Ceres allows us to do historical research in space, opening a window into the earliest chapter in the history of our solar system,” said Jim Green, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division at the agency’s Headquarters in Washington. “Data returned from Dawn could contribute significant breakthroughs in our understanding of how the solar system formed.”

Dawn began its final approach phase toward Ceres in December. The spacecraft has taken several optical navigation images and made two rotation characterizations, allowing Ceres to be observed through its full nine-hour rotation. Since Jan. 25, Dawn has been delivering the highest-resolution images of Ceres ever captured, and they will continue to improve in quality as the spacecraft approaches.

Sicilian astronomer Father Giuseppe Piazzi spotted Ceres in 1801. As more such objects were found in the same region, they became known as asteroids, or minor planets. Ceres was initially classified as a planet and later called an asteroid. In recognition of its planet-like qualities, Ceres was designated a dwarf planet in 2006, along with Pluto and Eris.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft took these images of dwarf planet Ceres from about 25,000 miles (40,000 kilometers) away on Feb. 25, 2015. Ceres appears half in shadow because of the current position of the spacecraft relative to the dwarf planet and the sun. The resolution is about 2.3 miles (3.7 kilometers) per pixel. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Ceres is named for the Roman goddess of agriculture and harvests. Craters on Ceres will similarly be named for gods and goddesses of agriculture and vegetation from world mythology. Other features will be named for agricultural festivals.

Launched in September 2007, Dawn explored the giant asteroid Vesta for 14 months in 2011 and 2012, capturing detailed images and data about that body. Both Vesta and Ceres orbit the sun between Mars and Jupiter, in the main asteroid belt. This two-stop tour of our solar system is made possible by Dawn’s ion propulsion system, its three ion engines being much more efficient than chemical propulsion.

“Both Vesta and Ceres were on their way to becoming planets, but their development was interrupted by the gravity of Jupiter,” said Carol Raymond, deputy project scientist at JPL. “These two bodies are like fossils from the dawn of the solar system, and they shed light on its origins.”

Ceres and Vesta have several important differences. Ceres is the most massive body in the asteroid belt, with an average diameter of 590 miles (950 kilometers). Ceres’ surface covers about 38 percent of the area of the continental United States. Vesta has an average diameter of 326 miles (525 kilometers), and is the second most massive body in the belt. The asteroid formed earlier than Ceres and is a very dry body. Ceres, in contrast, is estimated to be 25 percent water by mass.

“By studying Vesta and Ceres, we will gain a better understanding of the formation of our solar system, especially the terrestrial planets and most importantly the Earth,” said Raymond. “These bodies are samples of the building blocks that have formed Venus, Earth and Mars. Vesta-like bodies are believed to have contributed heavily to the core of our planet, and Ceres-like bodies may have provided our water.”

“We would not be able to orbit and explore these two worlds without ion propulsion,” Mase said. “Dawn capitalizes on this innovative technology to deliver big science on a small budget.”

In addition to the Dawn mission, NASA will launch in 2016 its Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft. This mission will study a large asteroid in unprecedented detail and return samples to Earth.

NASA also places a high priority on tracking and protecting Earth from asteroids. NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) Program at the agency’s headquarters manages and funds the search, study and monitoring of asteroids and comets whose orbits periodically bring them close to Earth. NASA is pursuing an Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM), which will identify, redirect and send astronauts to explore an asteroid. Among its many exploration goals, the mission could demonstrate basic planetary defense techniques for asteroid deflection.

Dawn’s mission is managed by JPL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate’s Discovery Program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK, Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft.

The German Aerospace Center, Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Italian Space Agency and Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team.

We are poised to take advantage of a remarkable confluence of technological advances and scientific opportunity. For the first time, very fast, wide bandwidth, high-gain, low noise near-infrared avalanche photo diode (APDs) detectors are available and reasonably priced.

Dr. Wright and her team are designing and constructing a new SETI instrument to search for direct evidence of interstellar communications via pulsed laser signals at near-infrared (900 – 1700 nm) wavelengths. The new instrument design builds upon our past optical SETI work, and is the first step toward a new, more versatile, and more sophisticated generation of very fast optical and near-infrared pulse search devices.

Dr. Wright will discuss the advantages of SETI searches at near-infared wavelengths. Dr. Wright will also present the instrument layout, including an overview of the opto-mechanical design, detector selection and characterization, signal processing, and integration procedure.

Finally, she will describe our initial observational setup and search strategies for SETI targets and other astronomical studies.

There have been a number of books and movies about the end of the earth when a not-so heavenly object descends with extreme prejudice upon our helpless little planet. In Fury of the Fifth Angel, Pat and Chris Hoffman depict a scenario short of total oblivion by a space salvo but devastating none the less. Coming from a background in the power industry, they give a realistic portrayal of how civilization quickly descends into chaos as our utilities and other services switch off during a catastrophic cosmic pelting.

This book, Part I in a series, introduces a large number of characters in a diversity of places and backgrounds who participate in several parallel subplots. They illustrate the many ways such an event would impact, so to speak, a complex modern society, which can revert surprisingly quickly to a raw primitive condition. Presumably Part II will follow these characters as they struggle to survive in the chaos following a cataclysm and to rebuild their society.

With so many characters, it’s not too surprising that most are one dimensional and only a few stretch into 2-D, while none have any great depth. But it is the disaster – before, during and afterwards – that is being depicted and the characters are drawn well enough to profile it in vivid 3-D.

There is a lengthy build up to the action from above and a focus in more than one of the subplots on efforts of the powers-that-be to keep quiet the approaching threat. In a day when most any celestial object that can be seen by one observer is quickly found by multiple observers all of whom race to be the first to report the discovery on line, the suggestion that such a finding could be suppressed is unrealistic. Furthermore, it is clearly nearly impossible to keep secrets these days in government and in large organizations, especially dramatic earth-shaking kinds of secrets.

That said, Fury of the Fifth Angel is a fun and thought-provoking read that provides a fine contribution to the celestial catastrophe genre.

The Arete STEM Project is a new Kickstarter campaign to fund K-12 STEM projects on suborbital high altitude flights using XCOR‘s Lynx rocketplane. Here is a video introduction to the project:

The project aims

to help all students, whether from a public, private, parochial, or home school environment, to develop the competitive skills necessary to compete in the 21st century workplace.

[…]

We believe this can be accomplished by allowing students to use their creatively to design, build, and test microgravity experiments. We go one-step further by flying their experiments into space and then return the experiments to the students.

These student experiments or payloads will fly on Commercial Suborbital Flights.

A key factor to the success of our educational program is our unique relationship the one of the leaders in Commercial Spaceflight, XCOR Aerospace www.xcor.com and their Lynx suborbital spacecraft.

The procedure for students goes as follows:

So how does it all come together? Here are the basics:

First, students reserve their experiment’s payload slot on the Lynx. This is the start of their space adventure.

Once the reservation is secured, students go through an Engineer Design Process to help them ready their payload (experiment) for suborbital flight. Through each stage of the design process students are monitored to help them reach their milestones/goals.

At 90 days prior to the suborbital flight, students are contacted to begin the final phases before their payload is sent into space. This is a simple student progress check that allows student to communicate any successes or problems they are accruing.

At 60 days, we can arrange for simulated flight-testing of the experiment and have all data sent to the student for any redesigns they may need.

30 days before the flight is scheduled all safety checks are accomplished.

Next, the actual flight and return occurs, including the return of experiments and all collected data to the students.

Finally, The Arete STEM Project hopes to help develop future scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians, as well as students willing to take on a life changing challenge.

After having the opportunity to design, develop and fly their work into space and back, students will be ready and eager for any challenges they may face in the 21st century.

What connects Earth’s largest, hottest desert to its largest tropical rain forest?

The Sahara Desert is a near-uninterrupted brown band of sand and scrub across the northern third of Africa. The Amazon rain forest is a dense green mass of humid jungle that covers northeast South America. But after strong winds sweep across the Sahara, a tan cloud rises in the air, stretches between the continents, and ties together the desert and the jungle. It’s dust. And lots of it.

For the first time, a NASA satellite has quantified in three dimensions how much dust makes this trans-Atlantic journey. Scientists have not only measured the volume of dust, they have also calculated how much phosphorus – remnant in Saharan sands from part of the desert’s past as a lake bed – gets carried across the ocean from one of the planet’s most desolate places to one of its most fertile.

For the first time, a NASA satellite has quantified in three dimensions how much dust makes the trans-Atlantic journey from the Sahara Desert the Amazon rain forest. Among this dust is phosphorus, an essential nutrient that acts like a fertilizer, which the Amazon depends on in order to flourish. Image Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

A new paper published Feb. 24 in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, provides the first satellite-based estimate of this phosphorus transport over multiple years, said lead author Hongbin Yu, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Maryland who works at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. A paper published online by Yu and colleagues Jan. 8 in Remote Sensing of the Environment provided the first multi-year satellite estimate of overall dust transport from the Sahara to the Amazon.

This trans-continental journey of dust is important because of what is in the dust, Yu said. Specifically the dust picked up from the Bodélé Depression in Chad, an ancient lake bed where rock minerals composed of dead microorganisms are loaded with phosphorus. Phosphorus is an essential nutrient for plant proteins and growth, which the Amazon rain forest depends on in order to flourish.

Nutrients – the same ones found in commercial fertilizers – are in short supply in Amazonian soils. Instead they are locked up in the plants themselves. Fallen, decomposing leaves and organic matter provide the majority of nutrients, which are rapidly absorbed by plants and trees after entering the soil. But some nutrients, including phosphorus, are washed away by rainfall into streams and rivers, draining from the Amazon basin like a slowly leaking bathtub.

The phosphorus that reaches Amazon soils from Saharan dust, an estimated 22,000 tons per year, is about the same amount as that lost from rain and flooding, Yu said. The finding is part of a bigger research effort to understand the role of dust and aerosols in the environment and on local and global climate.

Dust in the Wind

“We know that dust is very important in many ways. It is an essential component of the Earth system. Dust will affect climate and, at the same time, climate change will affect dust,” said Yu. To understand what those effects may be, “First we have to try to answer two basic questions. How much dust is transported? And what is the relationship between the amount of dust transport and climate indicators?”

The new dust transport estimates were derived from data collected by a lidar instrument on NASA’s Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation, or CALIPSO, satellite from 2007 though 2013.

The lidar instrument aboard the CALIPSO satellite sends out pulses of light that bounce off particles in the atmosphere and back to the satellite. It distinguishes dust from other particles based on optical properties. Image Credit: NASA Goddard’s Scientific Visualization Studio

The data show that wind and weather pick up on average 182 million tons of dust each year and carry it past the western edge of the Sahara at longitude 15W. This volume is the equivalent of 689,290 semi trucks filled with dust. The dust then travels 1,600 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, though some drops to the surface or is flushed from the sky by rain. Near the eastern coast of South America, at longitude 35W, 132 million tons remain in the air, and 27.7 million tons – enough to fill 104,908 semi trucks – fall to the surface over the Amazon basin. About 43 million tons of dust travel farther to settle out over the Caribbean Sea, past longitude 75W.

Yu and colleagues focused on the Saharan dust transport across the Atlantic Ocean to South America and then beyond to the Caribbean Sea because it is the largest transport of dust on the planet.

Dust collected from the Bodélé Depression and from ground stations on Barbados and in Miami give scientists an estimate of the proportion of phosphorus in Saharan dust. This estimate is used to calculate how much phosphorus gets deposited in the Amazon basin from this dust transport.

The seven-year data record, while too short for looking at long-term trends, is nevertheless very important for understanding how dust and other aerosols behave as they move across the ocean, said Chip Trepte, project scientist for CALIPSO at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia, who was not involved in either study.

“We need a record of measurements to understand whether or not there is a fairly robust, fairly consistent pattern to this aerosol transport,” he said.

Looking at the data year by year shows that that pattern is actually highly variable. There was an 86 percent change between the highest amount of dust transported in 2007 and the lowest in 2011, Yu said.

Why so much variation? Scientists believe it has to do with the conditions in the Sahel, the long strip of semi-arid land on the southern border of the Sahara. After comparing the changes in dust transport to a variety of climate factors, the one Yu and his colleagues found a correlation to was the previous year’s Sahel rainfall. When Sahel rainfall increased, the next year’s dust transport was lower.

The mechanism behind the correlation is unknown, Yu said. One possibility is that increased rainfall means more vegetation and less soil exposed to wind erosion in the Sahel. A second, more likely explanation is that the amount of rainfall is related to the circulation of winds, which are what ultimately sweep dust from both the Sahel and Sahara into the upper atmosphere where it can survive the long journey across the ocean.

CALIPSO collects “curtains” of data that show valuable information about the altitude of dust layers in the atmosphere. Knowing the height at which dust travels is important for understanding, and eventually using computers to model, where that dust will go and how the dust will interact with Earth’s heat balance and clouds, now and in future climate scenarios.

“Wind currents are different at different altitudes,” said Trepte. “This is a step forward in providing the understanding of what dust transport looks like in three dimensions, and then comparing with these models that are being used for climate studies.”

Climate studies range in scope from global to regional changes, such as those that may occur in the Amazon in coming years. In addition to dust, the Amazon is home to many other types of aerosols like smoke from fires and biological particles, such as bacteria, fungi, pollen, and spores released by the plants themselves. In the future, Yu and his colleagues plan to explore the effects of those aerosols on local clouds – and how they are influenced by dust from Africa.

Dwarf planet Ceres continues to puzzle scientists as NASA’s Dawn spacecraft gets closer to being captured into orbit around the object. The latest images from Dawn, taken nearly 29,000 miles (46,000 kilometers) from Ceres, reveal that a bright spot that stands out in previous images lies close to yet another bright area.

This image was taken by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft of dwarf planet Ceres on Feb. 19 from a distance of nearly 29,000 miles (46,000 kilometers). It shows that the brightest spot on Ceres has a dimmer companion, which apparently lies in the same basin.

“Ceres’ bright spot can now be seen to have a companion of lesser brightness, but apparently in the same basin. This may be pointing to a volcano-like origin of the spots, but we will have to wait for better resolution before we can make such geologic interpretations,” said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Using its ion propulsion system, Dawn will enter orbit around Ceres on March 6. As scientists receive better and better views of the dwarf planet over the next 16 months, they hope to gain a deeper understanding of its origin and evolution by studying its surface. The intriguing bright spots and other interesting features of this captivating world will come into sharper focus.

These images of dwarf planet Ceres, processed to enhance clarity, were taken on Feb. 19, 2015, from a distance of about 29,000 miles (46,000 kilometers), by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. Dawn observed Ceres completing one full rotation, which lasted about nine hours.

The images show the full range of different crater shapes that can be found at Ceres’ surface: from shallow, flattish craters to those with peaks at their centers. These views show sections of Ceres’ surface that are similar to those in PIA19056.

“The brightest spot continues to be too small to resolve with our camera, but despite its size it is brighter than anything else on Ceres. This is truly unexpected and still a mystery to us,” said Andreas Nathues, lead investigator for the framing camera team at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Gottingen, Germany.

Dawn visited the giant asteroid Vesta from 2011 to 2012, delivering more than 30,000 images of the body along with many other measurements, and providing insights about its composition and geological history. Vesta has an average diameter of 326 miles (525 kilometers), while Ceres has an average diameter of 590 miles (950 kilometers). Vesta and Ceres are the two most massive bodies in the asteroid belt, located between Mars and Jupiter.

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft obtained these uncropped images of dwarf planet Ceres on Feb. 19, 2015, from a distance of about 29,000 miles (46,000 kilometers). They are part of a series taken as Dawn observed Ceres completing one full rotation, which lasted about nine hours.

The images show the full range of different crater shapes that can be found at Ceres’ surface: from shallow, flattish craters to those with peaks at their centers. These views show sections of Ceres’ surface that are similar to those in PIA19056.

Dawn’s mission is managed by JPL for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate’s Discovery Program, managed by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK, Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. For a complete list of acknowledgements, visit: dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission

Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R) and Representative Chaka Fattah (D) will co-host the press conference in the House Space Subcommittee hearing room in the Rayburn office building. Chair of the NSS Executive Committee Mark Hopkins said: “NSS is proud to be a founding member of ASD. We see space as a place not just to visit but to stay. The time is right to galvanize the space community toward a greater focus on space development and settlement.” SFF President James Pura said: “The Space Frontier Foundation sees the new Alliance as an important way to advance the central issue for the next era of space—the development and settlement of space as a growing contributor to human prosperity and well being.”

ASD is organized around three key goals: (1) making the development and settlement of space clearly defined parts of why we are sending humans into space, (2) reducing the cost of access to space, and (3) stimulating and accelerating the growth of space industries.

In 2015, ASD objectives include (1) incorporation of space development and settlement into the NASA Space Act, (2) a four-point plan to reduce the cost of access to space, (3) full support of the Commercial Crew program as requested by the Administration, and (4) increasing the utilization of the International Space Station (ISS) while ensuring a gapless transition to private space stations with NASA helping with development and acting as an anchor tenant.

The ASD 2015 legislative strategy is a unified action plan that incorporates previously uncoordinated projects and activities, such as the March Storm (www.marchstorm.com), the August Home District Blitz (www.nss.org/legislative) and other activities of ASD member organizations.

February 25, 2015— antennaFILMS, the Producing/Directing team behind the award-winning television documentary Black Sky about X-Prize winning SpaceShipOne, has signed on to produce a documentary that follows Aerospace Legend Burt Rutan that will highlight the maverick designer’s vast accomplishments, the legacy he created in the field of aviation and his newest “secret garage” venture.

Burt Rutan, the champion of homebuilts, the designer of Voyager, SpaceShipOne, and 43 other aircraft that have flown, is building a new plane. Co-Director Scott B says “I can’t reveal much about the plane, but it will be a game changer. It’ll do things no plane has ever done before.”

What more would you expect from the man who designed the VariEze, put a man in space, and built a plane that circumnavigated the globe without refueling?

antennaFILMS is reaching out to Burt’s fans and the entire aviation community to help fund the film as they have the opportunity to capture an amazing moment in history witnessing the building and testing of what could be Burt Rutan’s final plane.

The filmmakers set their Kickstarter goal at $80,000 for this stage of the production and are excited to share this project with the aviation community.

“Because he’s building his new plane so quickly we need to make this project happen now,” said Sandy Guthrie, Co-Director and partner in antennaFILMS.

Scott B and Sandy Guthrie, co-directors on the project and partners at antennaFILMS, have filmed Rutan for over a decade now, winning a Peabody Award for Excellence and a Cine Golden Eagle Award for their Discovery Channel documentary “Black Sky: The Race For Space” that documented Rutan and his team winning the $10 million Ansari X-Prize.

“Making a film of a caliber that does justice to Burt’s successes and contributions takes a lot, so ideally we’re hoping to surpass our $80,000 goal.” said Sandy Guthrie. “Kickstarter gives us the ability to reach out on a grass-roots level and to have Burt’s fans participate in the making of this film from the beginning.”

Scott describes Burt Rutan as one of the greatest innovators of our time who helped revolutionize the aviation and aerospace industry, and whose accomplishments and story will inspire young engineers and airplane enthusiasts for years to come. Rutan has a record number (5) of aircraft on permanent display in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

“Even $5 pledges will help,” said Scott. “We’ve been to Oshkosh with Burt, we’ve covered SpaceShip events in Mojave since 2004 and we know we will be able to give Burt’s vast fan base a thorough and thoughtful look into his life and accomplishments.

Over the years I’ve occasionally posted about The Martin Jetpack in development in New Zealand. (See, for example, here and here.) Hardware development has progressed steadily if not exceptionally fast. They plan to begin selling vehicles in the second half of 2016.

Initially they will sell to emergency service providers and then sell to general public customers in 2017. The cost will be around US$200k. The vehicle will also be marketed for applications as an unmanned drone called the Martin Skyhook that can carry up to 120 kg.

Here’s a video of an unmanned flight test from last year:

It obviously doesn’t actually use jet engines but ducted fan driven by a two-stroke V4 piston engine. It can fly for up to 30 minutes. Here are the technical specs. Note it has a ballistic parachute for emergencies.